Firebowl –
Firebowl - Side View
First off, this is not really a fire bowl meant to hold fire. But it is a fire bowl. Let me explain.
I took a class in pyrography to further my ability to enhance the surface of the bowl, vessel or sculpture I was working on. Being no great artist myself, I became fascinated with the different burning patterns that pyrographers use. I went to the Internet and researched all I could.
Firebowl - Top View
I became fascinated with burning Braille or morse code into the surface of a piece (still waiting for the right piece on that one). I also found some old cartographer’s symbols back in the day before maps were printed in color. But I got sidetracked when I found some artwork by the late John Warangkula Tjupurrula.
John was an aboriginal artist from Australia who pioneered the dot art technique in modern paintings. I became fascinated with both the bright colors and strong but simple shapes used to tell a story in the painting. I particularly liked the fact that most of the canvases were painted black instead of white. Black was my favorite background color for a bowl. So off I went exploring aboriginal dot art.
Firebowl - Bottom View
I had a bowl that I had cut out of oak. The grain was nice, but not great. Plus, this piece didn’t develop any nice cracks to embellish, so I thought I would try my first attempt at dot art.
It was a disaster. Getting all of the geometric forms to line up and complement each other instead of competing with each other was a lot harder than it looks and very time consuming. I spent the better part of three days painting and the end result was so disappointing that I sanded it all off and started over. But I waited about three months as I looked at more and more dot art. Then it dawned on me that I was trying to translate two-dimensional dot art (usually painted on cave walls) onto a three-dimensional object. Eureka!
Like a globe, I divided the bowl into a north and south pole with an equator. I painted the north and south pole separate and used the equator to pull the two regions together. Success! This time it took about five days of painting and hunting through the art stores for just the right brushes. And unlike a traditional canvas, you can’t just paint over a mistake…you have to sand the bowl clean and start all over. So needless to say I was very very careful.
After laying down the red lines for the circles, I started in with the white dots that really define the piece and are the hallmark of aboriginal art. Now that’s a lot of dots. Well over two thousand. Whew! But it was worth it. I chose a concentric circle as my main design element. It can mean various things in aboriginal art, like man, fire pit, camp site or fruit. So I chose fire. That’s why I call it fire bowl.
Firebowl - Close Up of Dot Art
There’s something very primal about it yet inviting. I’ve noticed that people just have to pick it up and turn it over and look at it. There is a resonance to this ancient art that echoes around even our far removed culture. This has quickly become one of my favorite surface embellishments. So look for more complex and colorful and interesting pieces in the months to come.
